


if i was lost for a day

by isozyme



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 05:27:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“It’s...Carlos, you know, the scientist who was vaporized last week by a freak beam of light from Radon Canyon,” Cecil said, with a strange little fumble over Carlos’s name.  “We all thought he was dead, but he’s back!  Welcome to the show, Carlos.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	if i was lost for a day

"Hey Cecil, it's Carlos," Carlos said, holding his mother's telephone a few inches away from his face. The receiver was emitting a loud and piercing whine in place of a dial tone, and Carlos was not certain if it was because his mother's telephone was ancient or because calling the phone number listed for Night Vale Community Radio on Cecil's facebook caused some sort of sonorific rift in reality.

The phone on the other end hadn't rung, but Carlos figured he would try to leave a message anyway. The sheriff's secret police liked Cecil alright and might pass it on. "Cecil don't panic; I'm okay. The bright beam from Radon Canyon has transported me to my mother's house and it turned my phone into a scorpion, but I'll be back in a couple of days. Please call me. Not on my phone! Not on this phone either, it might melt from the strain. Shit, whatever, I've got a flight booked in two days. It won't be long, I promise."

Carlos put the phone down, ran a hand through his hair, and wandered into the kitchen. It had been a couple of years since he’d made it back north; there’d been tight deadlines around Christmas and it had been too hard to get back for Easter. He’d missed home, with his mother’s scented candles perched on the windowsill behind the sink and the dull drone of cicadas outside. There were trees with actual green leaves here, and the little LED clock on the microwave was almost certainly real.

It occurred to Carlos, like a slap on the wrist, that he hadn’t told Cecil that he missed him on the phone.

When Carlos checked he discovered two cans of Budweiser shoved in the back of the fridge behind the bottled water and half a casserole dish of pasta salad bake. A blessing wrapped in aluminium.

His mother banged through the door in from the garden, carrying a plastic bag heavy with tomatoes. Seventy-three and still gardening, Carlos thought with a little pride. She raised an eyebrow at him as he rescued a can of beer from the depths of the fridge and cracked it open. "That stuff is terrible," she said.

Carlos shrugged. "I like it," he said, because that was easier than explaining that in Night Vale Budweiser only existed on Tuesdays and bank holidays, and on all other days beer bottles contained a noxious, heavier than air gas. 

"So," she continued, "who was it who you needed to talk to on the phone so badly?"

"Uh," Carlos said, "Work?"

Another raised eyebrow. This was worse than the time when he was 16 and she caught him holding hands with Marty Espezito in the grocery store, because now he was a grown man with a career, and an apartment, and surely other people didn't have to deal with this.

"Ma, it's nothing, don't make a big fuss."

"I'm just glad you're not alone, is all," she said, "I worry." 

Carlos immediately felt terrible. There were orders of magnitude of worry she was missing. His love life was the least worrying thing he could think of, but he couldn’t explain Night Vale. Nobody could explain Night Vale. There was a stack of lab notebooks threatening to topple off of his desk that weren’t helping explain Night Vale even a little. Carlos flicked the tab on his beer can with his thumb, the metallic _ping_ bright in the awkward silence.

"You don't need too," Carlos said, eventually. "I'm doing okay."

"Bring him home for Christmas, then,” she said, brushing her hands off on her pants and dumping the tomatoes into a colander. She frowned at Carlos, serious. “He’s no good if he doesn’t get on with the family.”

"Oh Lord, _Ma,_ " Carlos said, covering his face with his hand and cringing, until his mother’s frown dissolved and she smacked the counter, laughing.

“Your face, Carlos, you look like a beet!” 

Carlos thought about Cecil walking into their huge family Christmas while his mother mocked his blush. He thought of midnight mass and acolytes in long robes, thought of Cecil with his nose buried in the hymnal complaining that these chants were _completely incorrect,_ and had to laugh too.

*

The taxi driver pulled up in front of the Night Vale Community Radio building and let out a harrowing wail of despair. Carlos sighed and tipped him extra, as was customary, and checked the time. Cecil was in the middle of a broadcast, but the worst that could happen was that Carlos would have to give an on-the-spot interview.

The intern at the front desk squirmed a bit and Carlos thought that he might actually have to wait until Cecil’s segment was over.

Eventually the intern handed him a form and said “take this to Station Management,” which Carlos intended to avoid doing at all costs. Cecil’s recording booth was through a room full of filing cabinets that stretched from floor to ceiling in silent, olive-green rows. Carlos peeked through the window beside Cecil’s door and saw that he was definitely in the middle of something, leaning into the microphone and gesturing avidly with his hands, glasses askew and eyes bright.

This all added up to Cecil looking pretty normal, which meant that probably he’d gotten the news from the sheriff’s secret police. Carlos could have gone straight to lab instead, and turned off the laser and the thermocycler, which were pretty safe but didn’t like going so long without a break. Carlos was about to leave when he heard through the door, “Listeners, we have a special guest!” and Cecil gestured for him to come in. 

Carlos liked the recording booth. It was cramped, filled with monitors and switchboards and wires that didn’t always seem to connect to anything, and the lights flickered constantly, but it smelled like hot dust and burnt cloves, which was what Cecil smelled like.

“It’s...Carlos, you know, the scientist who was vaporized last week by a freak beam of light from Radon Canyon,” Cecil said, with a strange little fumble over Carlos’s name. “We all thought he was dead, but he’s back! Welcome to the show, Carlos.”

“Um, it’s great to be here, thanks,” Carlos said, and Cecil beamed at him.

“Did your disappearance unveil any special scientific findings?” Cecil asked.

“No, it only sent me to my mother’s house and turned my cell phone into a scorpion -- Cecil, did you get my message? Are you alright?”

Cecil looked confused, and shuffled the papers in front of him a bit. “So that’s a no on the scientific advances. Too bad!”

There was a silence. Carlos could feel the weight of dead air pressing down on him, but couldn’t come up with anything to say. This was not what he’d expected. Cecil was staring at him, looking hurt and lost. He’d wrapped the cord of his headphones all up in one hand, and was tugging at it a little, like a trapped bird. Carlos wanted to reach over and untangle it for him, slide his fingers across Cecil’s wrists and take his temperature for the secret mental chart he was keeping, in case it turned out to be significant.

Cecil was still looking at him. Carlos wanted to touch him so badly it ached in his palms.

Instead he said, “well, I did get a haircut.”

Cecil blinked and leaned forward, frowning. “Oh, so you did. Well, that’s just neat. A reminder to our listeners; Telly the Barber does a cheap trim out by the sandwastes! Anything else to add, Carlos?”

Carlos flinched. Cecil didn’t say Carlos’s name like that, not ever. He said it over and over on the radio, and it was _mortifying,_ but it was never casual. 

“I just thought you might want to see me,” Carlos said, quietly. “I’ll just go.”

“And there you have it folks,” Cecil said, forced-cheerful. “Sometimes science just doesn’t work. It goes to show that empirical evidence is flawed, death is a permeable barrier, and you should believe in _nothing._ ”

Carlos fled.

*

Carlos got back to lab and couldn’t sit. He kept trying settle down and write down the events at Radon Canyon and couldn’t be still even long enough to dig his lab notebook out from under the secret false bottom in his desk drawer. Every noise and beep made him spring up, to check the centrifuge and the logic boards and even the microwave. Nothing needed attention, but Carlos felt like the sky was falling. It was worse than the feeling when all electricity in Night Vale was briefly banned and Carlos’s freezers and supercooled magnets had started slowly but inexorably warming while he scrambled through the paperwork to get an exception.

When the centrifuge beeped again Carlos jerked so hard he knocked a specimen jar off of its shelf. It cracked on the floor and filled the lab with the heady reek of neat ethanol, and Carlos slammed his hand down on the desk in frustration. “Dammit,” he yelled, at the jar and at the centrifuge and because his desk wobbled threateningly, reminding him that he needed to replace one of the legs where a stray Boy Scout had nibbled it a little. Then he went to get paper towels.

It was just that Cecil’s adoration had been a constant, ever since Carlos’s first day in Night Vale. It had started as an unwelcome and embarrassing presence on the radio, and then, over time, as the solid point in Carlos’s life. The sky was not always blue, time didn’t work, the physical laws of the universe frequently took vacations, but Cecil always adored Carlos, simple and selfless.

Something had to have happened, Carlos was certain. Maybe the bright beam from Radon Canyon had altered some stream of causality, or there had been another doppelganger event. Unfortunately, in Night Vale, he couldn’t just ask around at the grocery store about anything unusual because he’d hear all about how such-and-so’s dog had given birth to real puppies, no glowing eyes or nothing, and could he believe that? Carlos could always believe that. He never heard about the new sinkhole with a portal to Soviet-era Siberia at the bottom that Moonlite’s All-Nite Diner was now using as air-conditioning. It was frustrating.

With the Night Vale Daily Journal mostly imaginary and also bankrolling a crusade of vigilante justice against news bloggers, he could either get his news from Cecil or get no news at all. 

Night Vale Community Radio kept all of their broadcasts archived online, on a website that, on a scale from presentable to geocities, landed farther on the 1998 side of the line than was really respectable. It worked, though, flashing purple header and all. Carlos wanted to ask Cecil if there were hypnotic tones worked into the site’s terrible gifs, badly enough that he reached for his phone to send a text, but his phone was a scorpion hiding somewhere in his mother’s front yard, and Cecil, well. Something had happened.

Carlos started listening to Cecil’s show in backwards order, excepting the last half of the most recent broadcast. He got to “Listeners, we have a special guest!” and then his ears got hot and his stomach twisted and Carlos was sprinting for the keyboard to skip past. From a scientific perspective, anything past that point was irrelevant anyway.

Cecil’s voice dug into Carlos’s ears and hummed into his brain. He waited for it to stab through him with loss or anger, but Cecil’s radio patter wasn’t built to draw out those sorts of feelings, so it didn’t. Carlos wondered sometimes if Cecil’s voice was had a little extra push behind it, a little Night Vale Special. “Talent comes from good hard work and appropriate, City Council approved, personal sacrifice,” Cecil had said, and looked reproachful, so Carlos had dropped the issue.

Soothed by the radio, even the mundane aches from folding himself into an airplane seat at five in the morning receded, and for an hour or two Carlos got things done; he catalogued all of his blood samples from a couple weeks ago, and cleaned up all of the experiments that shouldn’t have been left on his bench for a week and now needed to be restarted, and argued with the microscope saleswoman on the phone, again. (Night Vale and microscopes did not mix well, and Carlos didn’t think this was his fault, precisely.)

Maybe Cecil had just been caught off guard in the radio station. The last time Carlos had done an interview Cecil had gone moon-eyed two-minutes in and started talking about Carlos’s skin care, and Carlos’s bid to reach the public -- live mice flowing from the faucets instead of tap water was, in fact, a public health issue and should have been looked into immediately -- had been permanently derailed. Maybe station management had scolded Cecil, and he’d decided to take a more subdued approach to his personal life on radio. Maybe Carlos was over-analyzing a single data point. One couldn’t take an average of a single value. 

The recording of Cecil’s show hitched as it skipped to an earlier episode. “Go to the bathroom with a flashlight and try to weigh your shadow. Is it getting lighter? Welcome to Night Vale.”

Instead of breaking into the first news segment, a different voice said, “Due to sensitive information contained in this broadcast it has been replaced with the following monotonous tone:” and then the same voice took a deep breath and sang a long, discordant note. Carlos scrubbed back and forth to check if Cecil ever came back, but the whole track was D flat.

“Uh,” Carlos said, “okay then,” and skipped to the next one. This one was more or less normal. The whole segment about the plague of gentle fingers was intact -- Carlos remembered that incident with a little shudder and a suspicious glance at his desk chair -- but there were bits censored out of it too. Definitely more blips and beeps than usual.

Farther back, five, ten broadcasts before Carlos disappeared, there was a distinct uptick in the number of times the sheriff's secret police stepped in and edited things. Carlos started a spreadsheet.

Finally, much later than Carlos had planned to stay in lab before retreating to the studio apartment upstairs, there was an episode that Carlos remembered clearly enough to patch in the missing parts from memory. He and Cecil had gone on a one year anniversary date the same day that all of the waitresses in town had sprouted long-stemmed roses from the napes of their necks. Cecil had thought it was an incredibly romantic coincidence, and Carlos had been alarmed, and they had gotten in a fight. On the radio the next day Cecil had recounted the whole thing in excruciating detail, apologised, and gotten distracted talking about scientists and chlorophyll.

Only now there was only the story about the waitresses, and everything about their date and the following fight had been replaced with the charming sound of a lawn mower being pushed over sticks. Carlos went back through his spreadsheet, curious. On the day he’d vanished, the whole episode was gone, and before that, nothing about himself. He was wiped out of Cecil’s radio show like a mistake on a white board.

So, like a responsible scientist, Carlos dug back in the archives and found the first show he’d heard, the day when he had arrived in Night Vale. Carlos sat, shoulders up like a shield, and hit play. “A new man came--” said Cecil’s voice, and then the segment cut to the sound of a burbling brook, followed by the sound of a subway train arriving.

“I hate this town,” Carlos said, to nobody. He turned his chair towards the window and enunciated clearly for the listening device. “I hate this town.”

Then Carlos went upstairs and stood in the shower for an hour, until the water ran cold and the viscosity became strange and not entirely water-like.

*

The Shop and Save was a terrible place to sulk, but Carlos was out of milk and didn’t feel up to the challenge of drinking black coffee. He tried very hard not to think about how much sleep he’d gotten the previous night (none) and also not to feel any emotions at all.

Old Woman Josie waved him over as he walked past the milk aisle for the second time. “Can you get the chocolate milk from the back of the rack for me, dear? I can’t reach, and they always put the expired ones in front,” she said.

“Sure,” Carlos said, pulling his face from dead-eyed to charming and polite with a tired wrench.

As he reached over her, Old Woman Josie leaned in and whispered, “Stop listening to all that radio, too, you idiot. The secret police think you’re planning thought crimes.”

“What? Seriously? I can’t believe this,” Carlos said, closing the door on the milk. “I haven’t slept, and I had to walk an hour to get back to where I left my pickup, and then when I got there it was painted with a detailed mural of the desert behind it.”

“Don’t know who does that,” Old Woman Josie said vaguely, but then snapped back to her point. “You should be careful,” she said. “Only reason nothing bad ever happens to you is because Cecil likes you. Only reason anyone stays unscathed as long as you have, really.”

“Well that’s great then!” Carlos said, remembering that he wanted milk as well and opening the door again. “That’s just perfect. Any word on why he doesn’t remember me, or is that a thought crime too?” He shouldn’t snap at Old Woman Josie. She was sweet, and wrinkly, and hard as the sun-baked asphalt out in the parking lot. Her huge magenta earrings swayed when she shook her head despairingly at him. 

“You died,” Josie said, like that explained everything. Carlos was struck again by general frustration with Night Vale. He shut the door to the milk more forcefully than he should’ve, and a little paper tag that read “Buy one, get one soul-deep agony #5 free!” fluttered down to the ground.

As he bent down to retrieve it, Carlos said, “One, no I did not die, and two, what does that have to do with anything?”

“Outsiders,” Josie muttered under her breath, and then crinkled her eyes at him in a smile so she could pretend that she didn’t mean it. “Put it this way sweetie, how long do you think you’d last in Night Vale if you remembered all the people who’d left you?”

“I’m still here, aren’t I?” Carlos said.

“Hmmm,” Josie said, making the old woman noise that meant she didn’t believe him, but didn’t feel like arguing. “Couple years,” she said.

“How is everyone just okay with things like this?” Carlos asked. “And, wait, how do you even know that stuff?” Erika loomed over Josie’s shoulder and put a jar of olive oil in her cart. “Angels,” he said, answering his own question, and Josie patted the angel fondly on xir lower set of wings.

“Your milk’s going to go bad in three days,” Old Woman Josie said, prodding at his milk with one pink-lacquered fingernail. 

“Oh,” Carlos said. “Right.” While he turned to get a different jug, Josie trundled down the aisle towards the chips and blood salsa -- which wasn’t made with blood, just blood oranges and plasma, Carlos had been repeatedly reassured -- Erika floating behind her. She was just far enough away that yelling more questions down the aisle would be awkward. Carlos was almost certain that she’d calculated the distance on purpose.

Carlos leaned forward until his forehead pressed up against the cool glass of the door and stared at the milk, trying to wish his headache away.

“Are you okay mister?” asked a small child walking past, carrying a basket almost as large as she was, full of onions and jars of cinnamon.

The child’s face was wet with something and her eyes were blue all across her sclera. Carlos took two steps away, just in case. “No, actually, I’m not,” he said, because he’d learned not to lie to children in Night Vale.

“Uh oh,” she said in a sing-song voice, and carried on.

“Yeah, uh oh,” Carlos said, and went to check out.

*

Carlos hadn’t come to Night Vale to study bloodstone circles or glow clouds or time not working. Night Vale had a previously characterized topography that could be used as a model for several different types of soil erosion, which was widely applicable and important for the causes of many environmentalists. The beakers he’d brought with him were a joke from a colleague -- he’d planned on drinking beer from them.

Of course, once he’d arrived, the title on his grant had mysteriously changed from “Effects of Vegetation and Wind Gust Dynamics on Sandy Substrate Movement” to “SCIENTISTS. QUANTIFY. EVOLVE,” and the expiration date changed from “7/31/2013” to “TERRIFY.”

Carlos figured that this meant he could study whatever was most pressing, and in Night Vale, everything was pressing.

“I feel like an eighteenth century naturalist,” Carlos told Cecil one night, as he stood beneath the Arby’s sign and tried to chart the movement of the lights above it.

“Rich and well-endowed with land?” Cecil said, curious. Cecil was wearing a fleecey vest over his khaki tunic, so he was soft and warm to lean against. Carlos had recently optimized a system for recording star charts with only one hand, so that the other could stay tucked in Cecil’s back pocket.

“No!” Carlos said. “They just wrote everything down like their lives depended on it.”

“Isn’t that what all science really is?” Cecil had asked, and Carlos needed to think about it.

Cecil had been wrong, Carlos decided, sitting on the steps in front of his lab, drinking a hard cider and watching the rabbits close in on the dumpster behind Big Ricos. Science started with writing everything down. It started with assigning a number to every finch on a tropical island, and with recording the height of water tables for a century, and with taking a photograph of every Night Vale resident and sorting the portraits into three categories: photograph matches visual assessment, photograph does not match visual assessment, camera malfunctions (violently).

But then there was something else, something next. The world had polio vaccines and suspension bridges and space travel; there had to be another step past the data collection.

The sick feeling of too much coffee and not enough sleep was starting to recede, and Carlos felt contentment creeping up on him. He’d left the radio on inside and could hear the last fifteen minutes of the high school football match faintly playing out. Not against Desert Bluffs today, but the Cactus Hawks were putting up a good fight. 

A scorpion crawled up from under the porch, carapace glowing faintly blue in the shadows. Carlos tucked his feet up under him and watched it as it prowled closer, and hoped that it would eat the crickets that had set up shop behind the negative eighty degree freezer. They chirped rude messages in morse code, and Carlos thought they deserved eating.

The scorpion lifted a few centimeters off of the ground and vibrated once with a sharp buzz. When it hit the ground it was no longer a scorpion. Carlos picked it up and flipped it over in his hands several times, wondering how his cell phone made it all the way back from Wisconsin. Maybe it was a different cell phone, with all of his contacts copied, and all the familiar dings and scratches carefully replicated.

There was a text message from an unknown number which read: _thank you for using our delivery service. please tip with small insects and cotton soaked in water._

“Don’t change back,” Carlos told it, as he scrolled through his contacts. The first step to science was observation, the second step was analysis, and the third step--

On their first date, Carlos had spent the drive to the restaurant worrying that he wouldn’t like it, and that rejecting Cecil would be terrible and mortifying. He’d planned out three separate escape plans, two of which had revolved entirely around a convenient apocalypse (which Night Vale had helpfully supplied).

But he had liked it. He’d liked all of it, months and months of it. He’d even been considering bringing Cecil to meet his whole family for Christmas. At some point Carlos had stopped planning escapes.

“Hey Cecil,” Carlos said. “It’s Carlos. I’m calling for personal reasons, do you want to go out on a date?”


End file.
